Issue #9 (August/September 1980) of Different Worlds features a quite striking cover by Luise Perrine that seems to tie into an article appearing later in the issue. If so, that's the first example of this I've seen in Different Worlds. Typically, the covers of gaming magazines seem to bear little connection to the issue's contents, no doubt due to the circumstances under which they're commissioned. Still, I've admired Perrine's artwork ever since I first laid eyes on her illustrations for RuneQuest, so it's a treat to see her given the cover here.
The issue begins with "Flippancy in FRP" by my old nemesis, Greg Costikyan. The article advocates, in a tongue in cheek way, for more "silliness" or "flippancy" in roleplaying game sessions and campaigns. Costikyan covers multiple areas where he thinks a bit more "chaos" would help a game, such as handling alignment, religion, money, and character names. While his overall point is fair enough – we could all do with a little less lightheartedness from time to time – the article is, in my view, delivered with the obnoxiousness typical of a young man who thinks he knows it all (Costikyan would have been 21 years-old at the time of this article).
"Boardgames to RPGs" by Glenn L. Williams is much more interesting (and certainly less annoying). Williams examines the expectations RPGs and boardgames create in their players and the techniques employed in their design to fulfill those expectations. With that in mind, he suggests that it would be possible to use boardgames as the basis for roleplaying games. To prove his point, he takes Steve Jackson's Ogre and develops from it the outline of a RPG. What's interesting – but also slightly baffling – is that Williams makes the Ogres themselves the focus of he RPG, with the player taking on role of the artificially intelligent war machine rather than, say, a human soldier in the world the Ogres inhabit.
John T. Sapienza presents an extensive review of the Zargonian Figures produced Bearhug Enterprises. These figures are cardboard stand-ups to be used in place of miniature figures. I'd never heard of these specific figures but I am very familiar with the concept. Sapienza thinks very highly of the figures, both for their quality and their price, which he thinks will make them popular with gamers, Later, he reviews actual metal figurines by McEwan and Citadel. I find it fascinating how lengthy these reviews are. I've said before that I never used miniatures much back in the day (or now), so it's good to be reminded how important they were in many quarters of the hobby.
"The Imperium – A Traveller Campaign" by Marc Miller and Frank Chadwick is a five-page article, describing what would become the official GDW Traveller setting. Though I am deeply familiar with the Third Imperium as a setting, it was nevertheless a joy to read these. It reminded me of how much fun I had with Traveller and my own early days as a writer, creating adventures and setting material in the pages of Challenge. Anders Swenson reviews Judges Guild's Verbosh, which he considers a good investment for the money. Swenson also positively reviews Chaosium's Gateway Bestiary.
David F. Nalle's "Variable Alignment System" is yet another take on this venerable topic, this time presenting two point scales (Karma and Loyalty) to track a character's progress along the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes. It's fine, I suppose, but seems unnecessary for most people. Steve Perrin's "Cult of the Tiger" is another Gloranthan cult for RuneQuest (and the source of the issue's cover, I believe). Lewis Pulsipher's "Place for Adventure" is a short article, outlining nine unusual locations that might serve as adventure locales, such as animal burrows or giant bee hives.
This month's Gigi D'Arn column includes some intriguing tidbits. There's a lot of talk about movies, such as the shelving of plans for a D&D movie, along with rumors about Dragon Slayer, The Last Unicorn, and Conan the Barbarian. The comments from the latter are somewhat dismissive, though it's fascinating, from a historical perspective, to learn that filming on Conan was delayed due to the death of Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, where the movie was to be shot. There's also talk of a supposed "D&D/AD&D Companion" that will include lots of historical information on weapons and armor. I have no idea what Gigi is referring to here and it makes me wonder if there was ever any basis for the rumor in the first place.
Just FYI, Glenn L. Williams was the designer of Metagaming's Artifact (a personal favorite) and wrote a Space Gamer article for the Rivets microgame called Operation Boltcutter, which added a slew of rules for adding humans to the game. Rivets was a post-apoc game about AI robot factories fighting each other over resources with fairly dim-witted combat robots called Boppers and could plausibly have been set in the same universe as Ogre/GEV - there was another article hybridizing the games.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of roleplaying an Ogre AI (which could probably also be installed in other systems, like the autofactories that ruled the world after the incorrectly named Last War) is actually really interesting and well ahead of its time. The GURPS Ogre book touched on the idea years later, although it also had more traditional squishy organic PCs as a default. Ogre PCs would be durable enough to survive a nuclear battlefield where even power-armored human PCs would be very fragile, although obviously the types of adventures they could go on are limited. No seducing the barmaid for a Mark V. :)
Although playing an AI war machine who's also playing a fantasy RPG with other AI war machines between missions might be amusingly metafictional.
The Space Gamer is a plethora of all things Metagames. there's articles on OGRE, Rivets, Chitin I, ect.
DeleteIndeed, at least while Metagaming was still afloat. The magazine outlasted its parent by quite a margin, especially with Better Games (aka the Era Ten/Battle Born folks) taking it over. Very different magazine in that era, which sort of continues to this day.
DeleteI had Verbosh as a kid, and would agree that it was a good buy for the era. A little tongue in cheek in spots (the titular city's history bordered on Pratchett levels of institutional incompetence) but plenty of adventure seeds and a few more fully-fleshed out adventure locales. As JG products go it's one of teh better ones that I've encountered.
ReplyDeleteI played in a long running OD&D play by post set in Verbosh. I'm not sure how much of the content of the supplement we actually engaged, but it was a fun game.
DeleteI had Verbosh back in the day, and regret not finding space to keep it since it has not made it into official PDF form. It is an interesting mini-setting, though the reason I got rid of it was that ultimately without any expansion it was somewhat limited.
A quick search for "Verbosh pdf" tells me the operative word appears to be "official" in this case. There's at least one out there. Ordinarily I'm not a big proponent of piracy, but after all of Junior's racism I'm perfectly willing to accept any letters of marque you care to present, even if they're written on a napkin in wasabi sauce.
DeleteYea, Greg Costikyan annoyed me for his RPG content, though Paranoia and Toon ARE great contributions to the hobby, I never was attracted to them. He's got credit on a bunch of decent board games in addition. I know I sort of met him at a Boskone or two and it seemed like he was a bit silly there too. But certainly his age factored into that. I'm not sure I was aware just how young he was at the time, he's only (or not even) 4 years older than me.
ReplyDeleteHe was also largely (but not wholly) responsible WEG's Star Wars RPG, which was the gold standard for Star Wars for many a year and still holds up well today, as does the basic d6 engine. The guy could do serious rules when he had to. And Web & Starship is till one of the best wholly asymmetrical three-player games ever written IMO.
DeleteAs insufferable as he could be in his twenties (when everyone is insufferable anyway) he really peaked with the Hogshead "Designer X" stuff, which was truly mean-spirited and really showed how little he thought of his audience. Pretty much marked the end of his career in tabletop gaming, with him moving on to computer gaming and some academic game theory work afterward.
Unless I'm mistaken, aren't the rules of WEG's Star Wars reworks of those in the earlier Ghostbusters game? If so, the real design work was done by Greg Stafford, Sandy Petersen, and Lynn Willis. I don't say this to be dismissive of Costikyan's own accomplishments, which are considerable, but I think Stafford in particular gets overlooked for his design acumen.
DeleteSort of, although GB is quite a bit lighter mechanically. From what I've been told (third hand, so take that for what it's worth) Costikyan did a lot of the work on building out SW using the frame of what would eventually be called the d6 engine - but that engine was certainly the brainchild of Stafford, Peterson, and Willis. The two games were released only a year apart, and it's probably reasonable to assume their development cycles overlapped.
DeleteWhile I'd agree that Greg Stafford probably doesn't get quite as much credit as Sandy Peterson from most people, Lynn Willis is the one who really gets the short end of the stick. He spent 30 years with Chaosium and was editor-in-chief for a lot of it (retiring five years before his death from Parkinson's Disease), and contributed to many of their best known products including Masks of Nyarlathotep and co-development of 5th and 6th edition CoC and the Elric RPG. He also produced three of my favorite Metagaming products (Holy War, Godsfire, and Olympica) and GDW's Bloodtree Rebellion, which is a rather fantastic look at a Viet Nam style military/political campaign on an alien world.
I'm also quite pleased to see that Willis' first Chaosium boardgame, Lords of the Middle Sea, is getting an RPG built around its quirky post-apocalyptic setting. It's a nice nod to the one of company's most important but somewhat overlooked contributors.
Lynn Willis is indeed a forgotten titan of the hobby. I had only a handful of interactions with him over the years, but he always struck me as a thoughtful, generous fellow.
DeleteViolence is actually quite funny IMHO (how your typical dungeon crawl would look like in a modern urban setting). Designer X even has a point there I think - slaying critters and racking up xp so that you can level up and go on to slay even bigger critters is not very imaginative and gets old really fast, even if you do it as the unbeatable "gamist" experience. Power Kill (the metagame attached to Puppetland by John Tynes) is way more preachy.
ReplyDeleteHumor is subjective. I'd agree that Power Kill is (if anything) even more mean-spirited (unlike Puppetland, which was quite good IMO) - but both Violence and PK were essentially rants against a game style. Justified rants, arguably, but ultimately still a variation on the theme of "your way of playing is wrong" and that's really not okay at all. It's no different than Gygax insisting that people were using D&D wrong if they didn't follow his lead, or White Wolf fans sneering at "old fashioned" fantasy campaigns, or the more uptight OSR gatekeepers refusing to admit not every change since (say) the BECMI days has been a bad one.
DeleteTelling other people they shouldn't play the style of game they enjoy is not only futile and rude, it's downright vain and pompous when you're charging for the privilege of being lectured - which both Tynes and Costikyan were doing when those games were released.
I have to agree that playing as an AI strikes me as an intriguing concept for a game. I think that article points to how closely different kinds of gaming (that we now tend to regard as distinct) were entwined at the time. With the board-game resurgence, we'll likely see more of that cross pollination. I've seen a number of highly-thematic board games that look like they would would make interesting RPGs, and I've seen a number of board games that incorporate role-playing elements (sometimes very strong roleplaying elements)
ReplyDelete